Adolescents' Strategies to Manage Mental Health Challenges In and After the Pandemic: Two Mixed-Methods Studies

Identifying the strategies adolescents use to manage mental health challenges can offer important insights into factors protecting against more severe difficulties. Yet little is known about adolescent-specific strategies to manage these challenges. To address this gap, we created an innovative online tool in which adolescents could share how they manage specific mental health challenges, that is, symptoms of hyperactivity/inattention, conduct problems, and emotional problems, and in which they could rate perceived helpfulness of their strategies. The first study, during the pandemic, investigated a community sample of 218 adolescents aged 16 to 19. Inductive analysis uncovered 51 strategies, some mirroring established emotion regulation or coping strategies, while others were novel. Strategies varied across symptoms; quantitative analyses indicated that the most frequently used strategies were considered helpful. To check for robustness, we performed a second study after the pandemic in an independent community sample of 118 adolescents aged 16-20. This study largely replicated the first study findings, suggesting that strategies used and rated as helpful during the pandemic were also used and rated helpful after it. In addition, the second study investigated whether perceived helpfulness was related to the specific goal of a strategy: problem solving or cognitive or experiential avoidance, which proved not to be the case. These two studies thus shed light on the wide array of adolescent-specific and symptom-specific strategies that adolescents find helpful. They offer valuable insights for designing prevention programs that may protect against more severe difficulties, as they resonate with adolescents' unique lives and needs.